It’s one of the oldest problems in business: how do you modernize an iconic but shopworn brand without destroying the essence of its appeal?

That’s the situation that faced Jon Goldwater in 2009 when he took over Archie Comics, a company cofounded by his father in 1939, as Publisher and CEO. A generation ago, Archie was one of the top comics companies in the world, routinely outselling DC and Marvel with its stable of teen humor titles. But changes in popular taste were not kind to Archie, Jughead, Betty, Veronica and the gang. By the 21st century, the comics were an oddity: a formulaic time capsule depicting a teen culture so remote and ancient that it might as well have been Middle Earth.

“I started rethinking things from the moment I arrived,” said Goldwater when we spoke by phone last month. “It’s not that anything was broken, but the brand was stuck in a place and time that was no longer relevant.”

Goldwater’s determination to turn Archie, which debuted as a corny humor feature in 1941, into a relevant property for today’s pop culture audience, started slowly but, by the end of 2015, has become one of the biggest stories in the comics business.

Bringing Riverdale out of the 1950s. The first big move happened in 2010 when Archie introduced a new cast member, a gay teen named Kevin Keller. “When [writer] Dan Parent approached me with the concept, I immediately said yes,” reported Goldwater. “We worked very hard to make sure Kevin was just another kid, that he belonged. I was confident that people would accept him as a part of the gang, and they did. He was an instant smash.”

Kevin Keller, a new addition to the Archie gang, was a breakout success. Art by Dan Parent, Image courtesy Archie Comics.

The success of Kevin Keller demonstrated that Archie could regain relevance by playing ju-jitsu with its long-held storytelling conventions, inverting the audience’s expectations of predictability and conservatism.

Marriage, Death and Zombies! One storyline explored Archie getting married, first to Veronica and then to Betty, and featured a more realistic narrative than the usual gag-a-minute humor that made the series famous. In 2014, one of these future versions of Archie heroically met his end protecting Senator Kevin Keller from an assassination attempt. This “Death of Archie” story garnered a huge amount of media attention, once again playing against the public perception that Archie dealt exclusively in light, formulaic stories for kids.